Grist for the Mill:Guidebook to Controlling Childrenand The Population Through re-Education in Chicago Public Schools

LEARNING AND INSTRUCTION: A CHICAGO INNER CITY SCHOOLS POSITION PAPER PRESENTEDin June of 1968 to the ChicagoBoard of Education, was produced by the planning

staff in Chicago made up of: Dr. Donald Leu, William Farquhar, Lee Shulman, and the Chicago and Michigan State universities in collaboration. One reference used was Soviet Preschool Education, translated by Henry Chauncey (Educational Testing Service, Princeton, N.J.).

Excerpts from the Chicago Mastery Learning Project position paper, Learning and Instruction, follow:"We view the child with his defined characteristics as input to a school organization which modifies his capabilities toward certain goals and objectives as output. The school organization is an optimal deployment of teachers employing a special subject matter who attempt through instruction, with the aid of selected elements of the community, to achieve specified outputs. The joint participation of the children, school and community leave none of these elements unchanged.... This emphasis should be accomplished within the context of a truly ungraded structure which we shall denote by the terms Continuous Development-Mastery Learning. This approach has the following characteristics: (a) Beginning with Chicago's present concept of Continuous Development, the objectives of the language arts curriculum must be much further differentiated and articulated in the manner currently being conducted by Sophie Bloom [wife of the late Benjamin Bloom] in Chicago, and Pittsburgh'sIndividually Prescribed Instruction Project. In the Continuous Development-Mastery Learning approach, a large number of sequentially designated objectives, tied into specific capabilities to be mastered by pupils, are identified. This is done by curriculum development specialists in collaboration with instructional personnel. [References used in this paper were from the late Benjamin Bloom, John Carroll, Robert Gagne, Robert Glaser and Henry Chauncey, ed.]"

The following is an excerpt from an article published in Education Week, March 6, 1985 entitled "Half of Chicago Students Drop out, Study Finds: Problem Called Enormous Human Tragedy": "Calling the dropout problem in Chicago "a human tragedy of enormous dimensions," a recent study has found that almost half of the 39,500 public school students in the 1980 freshman class failed to graduate, and that only about a third of those who did were able to read at or above the national 12th grade level. "These statistics about the class of 1984 reflect the destruction of tens of thousands of young lives, year in and year out," says the study, released in January by Designs for Change, a nonprofit research and child-advocacy organization in Chicago.... "Most of these young people are permanently locked out of our changing economy and have no hope of continuing their education or getting a permanent job with a future," the authors wrote." Professor Lee Shulman's involvement in the Chicago Mastery Learning disaster was, however, quickly forgotten or considered unimportant. According to Education Daily of May 21, 1987-two years later: "Shulman, who heads Stanford's Education Policy Institute, last week was awarded $817,000 by Carnegie Corporation to develop over the next 15 months new forms of teacher assessment materials that would be the basis of standards adopted by a national teacher certification board." SOURCE: The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America